eBooks - Some thoughts

First, fair warning, I own an Amazon Kindle eBook Reader, and while I dislike DRM, I don't see Amazon as the root-of-all-evil for using it (anymore than I saw Apple as the same for music and the iPod).  As a consumer, I'll buy whatever seems to work the best, and not worry too much if the there's not perfection there -- because perfection I find to be elusive and at best transient.  And also fair warning, I read a LOT of books, I have shelves and shelves at home (and work) groaning from stacks of books, I spend a lot on books, I love to read books, multiple areas, my Mom worked in a library, so I am not your average consumer in that area, I'm probably 99+% percentile.  If they ever get RFID working for humans, flashing blue lights will go off whenever I stumble into a Barnes & Noble or Softpro or Half-Price Books or other bookstore.  So all of that out of the way, let me put forward some thoughts on eBooks.

eBooks are Great!

1. They're portable!
2. You can carry a lot of books in essentially the eReader space of one printed book
3. You can read a book (or at least an Amazon Kindle book) on all sorts of platforms (PCs, Web, eReaders, Smartphones, etc.)
4. eBooks are easier to buy (no having to find time to run over to B&N or Quantum or wherever, chasing down or ordering a book, you see something you like in the NYT books section or wherever, you put it on your wish-list, or just buy it and done)
5. eReaders prices have come down to reasonable levels -- about what it costs me for a good bookshelf for maybe 1/10th the number of books the reader can hold
6. eBooks are about as Green as you can get, save a tree! Virtually carbon-neutral.

eBooks are not-so Great!

1. Screens are too small (6 or 9.7" typically -- ok for fiction, not so good for technical or anything with a lot of pictures or graphics)
2. Color needs work (someone's going to say iPad, but I see that as just a start, and you still need to solve #1, so nobody is going to say it's to the point that it does an art-book or coffee-table type book very well, close but not quite)
3. DRM and Closed Platforms (OK, I did say I could live with DRM, but I still don't like it, and the Kindle/ePub wars are sort of Sony/VHS, getting tired of these things, there should be a standard)
4. Not all books are available

which leads me to really one of the biggest impediments, right now, ePublishers:


Publishers don't seem to Get eBooks

There are exceptions of course, O'Reilly seems to get eBooks, but on the whole, despite the fact that most of the Web is words, and publishers have all along been about making money by making words available to the public, many publishers seem to be caught back in some time warp where many would just like to pretend eBooks don't exist.  This is not unprecedented, look at how much trouble Apple had with music publishers and acceptance of the iPod model, and that was even after digital copying (and some dumb pricing models) had pretty much started to destroy their market; Apple was offering them a lifeline and they were slow to grab hold of it.  Amazon (and to be fair, others) were giving book publishers the same sort of lifeline, creating a digital book distribution system for published works, in effect eliminating 90% of the distribution costs, eliminating returns and remainders, improving being able to keep hot-sellers in stock, virtually eliminating the half-price seller and library book sale competition, etc.  But the publishers got too caught up in losing pricing control, and forced Amazon over into a controlled pricing model by using Apple and selective (almost monopolistic) withdrawal threats.  As a consumer, parts of what they did I took a very dim view of.  So I think there should be a ePublisher Bill-of-Rights, along these lines:

1. All books will be published in eBook formats for all the major platforms
2. eBooks will always be priced at less than the discounted going paper book price,
   that's about 30-40% off for a hardcover, about 10% off of a large paperback, never more than the mass market paperback if that comes out -- all to reflect the lower distribution costs of eBooks

I realize change is traumatizing to the Publishers, but change is not apriori bad, it can re-energize an industry.  The main problem I think with the music (and to some degree movie) industry and digital transformation is that they were slow to respond and then did so in ways where they tried to restrict the market or got maybe a little too greedy.  You're borderline greedy with the forced higher prices now, and as a consumer, I really don't like it when you come out with a paperback, and don't adjust the eBook prices to match.  Think of what happened to the music industry when CDs came along, they made a lot of money selling or reselling in the different format, book Publishers could too.  Customers will applaud you for it, if you handle it correctly.